The invention disclosed herein relates generally to data management and user interface systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for managing a list of data items such as addresses and a user interface for providing access to and use of the data items in languages such as Japanese which use phonetic and symbolic characters.
Data can be sorted in many ways. In many computer systems, data is sorted using the ASCII character set. Each character in the ASCII set is assigned a numerical value and data represented in ASCII format is sorted using these number values. The English alphabet is arranged in the ASCII character set in proper order, so that sorting a list of data according to ASCII is generally consistent with sorting the data alphabetically.
However, the order in which data is sorted in other languages is not always consistent with the order in which data sets such as ASCII are sorted. Moreover, some Asian languages, Japanese in particular, do not have an alphabet per se but rather employ symbolic characters and phonetic characters. In Japanese, concepts are represented by the ideographic or symbolic characters called kanji, while sounds are represented by one of two phonetic character sets, hirigana and katakana, collectively referred to as kana. Although Japanese people visualize and read in kanji, kanji symbols do not have any inherent sequence which would make them suitable for sorting. The phonetic character sets, on the other hand, are organized in a sequence, for example, according to the gojuuonzu (or "table of fifty sounds"). The phonetic characters can also be represented in English characters, a representation called romaji.
Japanese people prefer to read kanji characters but prefer to see data ordered according to kana. However, computer character sets such as ASCII or Unicode (a standard, two byte, multilingual character set which is a superset of ASCII) can not provide the functionality needed to sort data according to a scheme different than how the data is displayed, and thus existing computer systems do not, to the inventor's knowledge, meet the needs of the Japanese market.
The sorting problem described above becomes particularly important in the context of application programs which use data represented in one particular format. For example, a messaging system which transfers messages among users or among post offices determines where to send messages based on addresses represented in ASCII according to a predefined format such as the standard Internet e-mail format. Also, web sites available over the World Wide Web are identified by Uniform or Universal Resource Locators or URLs represented in ASCII characters according to a predefined format, and browser programs search for and locate particular sites and particular documents stored on the sites using these URLs. As yet a further example, operating systems represent filenames or directory names in ASCII according to particular formats.
In programs of these types, Japanese users are forced to learn and employ the data format required for the particular program, even though the format is in ASCII with which they are not naturally familiar. Also, Japanese users must become accustomed to searching for particular data from a list of such data which is displayed in ASCII format and sorted according to ASCII, even though they are naturally familiar with entirely different display and ordering arrangements in their non-computerized applications.
There is thus a need for a program which presents data to Japanese users in the familiar kanji form sorted according to the familiar kana form, and which provides a user interface for Japanese users which allows them to work with data in kanji and kana but which functions with the data in the format required by the program.